


The Zenith Point

by holyfant



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, F/F, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-31
Updated: 2013-12-31
Packaged: 2018-01-06 21:21:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1111663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/holyfant/pseuds/holyfant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Born into a world where love only happens once and time runs a steady, merciless course, Kate and Irene find that some rules are hard to break.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Zenith Point

**Author's Note:**

  * For [radialarch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/gifts).



> Written for radialarch in the holmestice exchange. Happy holmestice, friend. :)
> 
> Fusion with [A. F. Th. Van der Heijden](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._F._Th._van_der_Heijden)'s novel Het Leven Uit Een Dag (Life in a Day), in which the human lifespan is 12 hours and everyone falls in love once.
> 
> Thanks to pasiphile for her invaluable help, and to hechicera for her extra suggestions. <3

** The Zenith Point **

 

_08:22 am_

Kate is born a while after dawn, in the anticlimactic lull of a day already begun. On the beach the stunned adults, the blinded old men have drifted away: to their last meal, to their one lover, to their approaching deaths. No clocks are set to Kate's first breaths, and the prophets of daybreak have retired to the early shade to rest their heavy limbs. Kate's mother, with spiderwebs of veins in the whites of her eyes, cradles her slippery infant with a curious mix of tenderness and resentment and squints in the hostile new light. Vaguely, she's aware of her life breaking in half: before child, after child.

“Born in the hush,” she says softly to her daughter, wrinkled with birth. “You're going to be a quiet one, aren't you?” She lets her index finger be grasped by the little hand and brings the tiny searching mouth to her nipple, brimming and overflowing. 

 

_09:06 am_

“Look, Katie,” Kate's mum says. Premature touches of grey are beginning to show at her temples, and Kate plays with her braids, kicks her feet. “I'm not going to see you for a few hours. _Be good._ Listen to miss and play with your classmates.”

“A few – hours?” Kate repeats, not understanding, still minutes too young to learn things of this size. “But mummy – that's –”

“I know.” She smiles, but not in her usual way. Kate squints at her mother's strange expression, tries to rearrange it into something meaningful, something to lean on. “Remember what I said. It only happens _once_. So keep your eyes open for it.” She brushes lint off Kate's shoulder, fingers lingering. 

Later: the mother hands the daughter her lunch and stands in the doorway, hand over eyes against the light she never got accustomed to – too busy giving birth to watch the dawn. A fading figure against brick lines. It never once occurs to her child, chasing after the day's butterflies, to look back.

Even if she knows the words, there is no concept of falling in love as Kate walks off to school – not yet. Her life will be summer: the moist weight of it, the syrupy crawling of time towards the cool comfort of evening. The autumn of her life will be sunset-coloured, and she will begin to die with the light, just seeing the world go dark before it's over. But now it's still only early morning, the light playful and soft, warming Kate's bright hair. London's construction cranes are working at their usual frantic pace as Kate pads the pavement, trying to step on her shadow. Looking up from the game, having outgrown it already, she sees the skyscrapers growing along her side second by second, gleaming, proud. The workmen never tire: they live up there and lower their dead with the cranes, slowly, with respect. Kate peers up at them through narrowed eyes. Some of them wave down at her, tiny ant figures on swarming hills. The dust of the city makes her cough.

And then there is the school gate, and Miss, who was born two and a half hours before dawn, and who was looking into the sun when it rose. She's wearing sunglasses that slip down her nose constantly.

“Children,” she says when they're all there, rosy and growing and sniffing each other out, “I may be blind, but I will teach you about love.”

 _You'll know it when you find it_ , Kate's mother had said, eternities ago, and she had let her child go.

~

“It only happens once,” Miss says as the sun laboriously climbs the steel-silent sky, “but _sometimes_...” She pushes her sunglasses back up her nose, swallows. Puts a chalk-dusted hand on her own belly, the gesture seemingly unconscious. “Sometimes it _lasts_ ,” she breathes then, a tender secret in the stale air of the classroom, and everyone around Kate sits up a little straighter.

~

Kate thinks, just once: how do _you_ know? How do _you_ know, if you're in here teaching us for hours instead of living, blinded to the beauty of the day by your own insatiable curiosity? How do _you_ know if it happens once, how do _you_ know if it sometimes lasts? How do _you_ know what its purpose is? But the brief rebellion passes, and she folds away the strange, slightly upsetting feeling of disbelief. The unsettling feeling she gets when she looks at the sharp shoulder blades of Eva sitting in front of her, the line of her red blouse over her shoulders and the pale, lovely skin beneath, glowing in the slow-moving beams of sunlight.

 

_10:54 am_

When Kate leaves school, the blurry glare of the city makes her squint for a long moment. Outside the light is stronger than it was, burning warmly through the thin material of her dress, and her body feels different; long and lean and blossoming. When the colours of the world finally retreat to their assigned lines, the world has changed almost as much as she has. She shades her eyes to look out over the street. In the distance, in the heart of the city, buses are whirring and people are looking for each other, while the cranes are swinging as always, breaking down and building up the city, indifferent to her or to anyone else.

She thinks about her mother, briefly. The growing grey at her temples when she sent Kate off to school. The pained eyes whenever she tried to look into the light. Then, the thoughts fade and the city calls, sun-clouded.

~

She wonders, trailing her hand over the hot stone of the buildings, when it will be her turn.

 

_11:07 am_

When Kate sees Irene for the first time, Irene is standing with her back towards Kate, leaning over an old jukebox, running a red-tipped finger over the dusty buttons of it. That shot of colour, the bright glint of her fingernails, draws Kate's eyes towards her – even though she's standing in a dark corner of a shady pub and Kate's eyes are not yet used to the gloom of the inside. She wavers in the doorway, unsure.

The old bartender, his eyes cloudy and blind, says gruffly: “What'll it be, luv?”

The woman in the corner clicks down a jukebox button. Light sounds of violins, playing with each other.

The woman turns, leans a hip against the jukebox. Her white dress attracts the sparse light. Kate watches her instead of answering.

“I think,” the woman says for her, “she'll have a gin and tonic.” She tips her head. “She looks like the type.”

Kate blinks, wishing her vision would clear, and feels something coming into existence inside of her.

~

Irene is a little over twenty minutes older than Kate. She was born on the exact moment of dawn, and so her life will be flooded with light from start to finish. Miss has told Kate's class about them: the sun-chasers, the luckiest of generations. They will never lose their footing, they will never have to find their way in the dark. “With a bit of luck,” miss had said, “some of you might fall in love with some of them.” A smile infused with something distant, like memory. “They burn slowly, like stars.”

Stars? Kate had heard of those. Miss had talked about them. The flipside of their lives, hidden for now, gems to be found at the descending of the day.

Kate's seen them, the sun-chasers, as she walked and grew towards the city: they're confident in the light, their bodies strong and tan. Everyone else seeks the shade as noon approaches, but the sun-chasers stay, completely in their element. Those born before dawn have to shade their eyes to not go blind in the white glare of the sun near-zenith, and those born after dawn go freckled and sun-burnt when unprotected for too long in the light.

Irene, a little too pale but still unmistakable, raises her eyebrows at Kate over the rim of her glass.

“Thanks,” Kate says quietly, looking down at her own drink. 

“I'm Irene,” Irene says. Irene's lips are red and smiling, and keep drawing Kate's eyes towards them.

“I'm,” she says intelligently, then loses her name. Her mouth goes dry.

She watches, with a sense of time remote, how Irene's lips leave a waxy film of colour on her glass.

~

Getting drunk is something you only do once in your life. Miss had put up a finger and told them to be careful about who to spend that with.

Kate knocks back her glass, and goes soft on the inside at the way Irene tips her head a little when she looks at Kate, as though Kate is a secret she found somewhere.

“Another?” Irene asks, and all the reasons why it shouldn't be possible recede further.

 

_11:28 am_

It should be impossible, and yet.

Sobered up, Irene takes Kate for a walk, and keeps incongruously to the shadow side of the street. Kate walks beside her, too scared to look sideways. They're too close together: their arms touch awkwardly, irregularly. Kate doesn't move away and neither does Irene, but it doesn't feel premeditated on Irene's end, and Kate feels something of despair rise in her.

It should be impossible, because Miss had said _you will fall in love once, and have a child once_. She had said _you will have the perfect union once – man, woman._

Kate is hyper-aware of the hairs on Irene's arm. 

Most importantly, most damningly – 

Miss had said _you will both know at once, and you will know the other knows._

 

_11:32 am_

They share the shade of a tree in the park. Irene's speckled with sunlight and slowly undoes her hair.

“So aren't you –” Kate says, haltingly. Nearly half an hour in and the movement of Irene's wrists still makes her feel short of breath.

“What?” Irene says, bobby pin in the corner of her mouth.

“Aren't you... looking for...? For – you know. For –” Kate can't trap the words, and trails off awkwardly.

Ancient birds that have seen more than one sunrise titter lazily high up in the tree. Irene sighs visibly.

“I was expelled,” she finally says.

“What, from school?” Kate says, startled. “Why?”

“I didn't believe them.” Irene looks back at Kate, and smiles. “I don't think it only happens _once_.”

The idea is so absurd Kate goes quiet for a moment.

“Oh, Kate,” Irene says, and throws her head back to shake loose the last coils of her hair. “Not the _scandalised silence_ , please.”

“I'm sorry, I just –”

“Don't know better.” Irene flashes her teeth in a quick smile. She settles back on her elbows and closes her eyes.

~

Kate wants to ask _so has it happened more than once to you, then_ and gathers her courage in her mouth for a while, readying herself to say it. But then the way Irene doesn't look at her for a while, eyes fixed on the canopy of the tree above, filters through and stops the words in their tracks.

 

_12:03 pm_

It's noon and stifling hot. Even the midday bugs go silent under the weight of the air. Kate strains to hear for a moment, but it seems even the construction workers have fled their world for now. The cranes, barely visible lines in the shimmer of the rising air, are still.

“L'enfer –” Irene begins to say in the hush, the _r_ sticking to the back of her throat.

“– c'est la répétition,” Kate fills in automatically, without much thinking. The old cliché, worn smooth by classroom use, pounded into her brain in the first hours of her life.

Irene turns to look at Kate. She looks surprised, which in turn surprises Kate.

“Is it?” Irene finally says.

“Well – yes,” Kate says, then frowns. “I mean, that's – isn't that how it's said?”

“I don't know,” Irene says. Her eyes narrow.

Kate feels uncannily like she's done something wrong, and sits unmoving, unable to look away from Irene.

“I think I was going to say something else,” Irene says finally, slowly, eyes drifting away from Kate.

 

_02:06 pm_

So they tilt, without much fuss, over the midday point of Irene's life. Kate has a strange, pressing feeling behind her sternum that she realises after a while means that she wants to cry. She hears Miss' voice somewhere in memory - _people born in daylight have no right to cry_ – and swallows, and swallows again.

Irene, lying in the shade. How do you know when someone else knows? How do you love someone who doesn't believe in it?

“We've been here hours,” Kate finally says. Saying it out loud makes her feel almost fearful.

“And?” Irene says, hooks an arm over her eyes. “Do you have anywhere to be?”

“We've –” Kate stops and has to start again, suppressing the beginnings of a cold shudder. “You've spent _ages_ with me.”

Irene is quiet for a moment. Kate can see her mouth tensing and relaxing, and then she says, crisply: “Are you hungry? I'm starving.”

 

_02:47 pm_

They spend over half an hour at the restaurant. A woman nursing a baby comes in with them – when their food arrives, the child is hiding under his mother's legs, playful and beginning to talk. Irene drinks wine, which confuses Kate for a moment, but then their elderly server dies quietly in a corner after serving them, and she forgets about it.

They sit across from each other, legs pooling together under the table. Irene angles her face towards the heavy sunlight falling through the window. 

Watching it, Kate wants to say: _I would kill for you if it meant I could have you_. She chews on the words as Irene stretches out her body in the sun, sweat delicately beading at the v of her neckline.

“Yes, the world is wrong,” Irene says, at the end of a long, cutlery-punctuated silence, soft and easy as though she's continuing a conversation that never stopped.

“Is it?” Kate says, used to Irene's odd way of talking by now and half distracted by the way Irene's shoulder has a red line of sunburn on it where the dress ends. She shouldn't have that, not as a sun chaser.

There's a short silence.

“For God's sake, Kate,” Irene suddenly says, and reaches out to grab Kate's jaw with sharp fingers. “What is _wrong_ with you?”

“What are you –”

“ _What?_ ” Irene snaps. “ _What is wrong with you?_ ”

Kate's throat works up the words, and it feels like she has no control over them. “Don't you know?” she finally manages, feeble, beaten raw with the grief of it. “How can you not know? You're supposed to...”

Irene's mouth clenches. Her jaw, square and sharp. Kate can't finish her sentence, because it's impossible, and so are they.

~

Outside, Irene kisses Kate briefly – the barest, most fleeting of touches.

“We could –” Kate says, in the burst of euphoria following.

“You know we couldn't,” Irene says, and kisses Kate again, but on her cheek this time.

On the street, the cobbles are steaming.

 

_04:41 pm_

It makes Kate angry, how Irene reaches out and then closes down, every time. How she seems so strong, so self-formed, so defined, but then caves to something inside her she has turned into truth. Kate thinks of her mother sometimes, how she is probably dead or nearly dying, and how she had told Kate to keep her eyes open for it.

Kate can only look at Irene through narrowed eyes, because otherwise she doesn't fit.

“I think we were born in the wrong kind of world,” Irene says at one point, and Kate thinks _but don't we make the world?_

“I think I am the wrong kind of woman,” Irene says, at another point, and she stands while time drips by them like treacle.

 

_06:13 pm_

What Irene will do for Kate: slide her nails into Kate's greying hair and scrape them over her scalp, pulling on the strands until Kate is light-headed and purring and loose-limbed, her body opening of its own account, falling towards Irene.

What Irene will not do for Kate: everything else, despite her breathing, despite the colour of her cheeks.

 

_07:33 pm_

“I wish,” Irene says.

They still have half an hour, a bit less. The minutes are still like miles, but shortening. Merciless.

“What do you wish,” Kate says softly, drawing a hand over Irene's forehead, feeling the shape of her skull beneath and ignoring the increasing looseness of the skin. She feels hardened, herself, thrust into the role of caretaker, with the sharp certainty of approaching solitude.

“I wish I'd been born at night,” Irene finally says, and rolls over to face the window, making Kate's fingers slide into her hair. Outside, there are new sounds: evening children playing in the stored warmth of the city stones. Night birds. People dying. The sky is a murky orange, with thin, drab sheets of clouds appearing at the horizon. Tomorrow's children will live an overcast life, Kate thinks; at school they were taught what it's called, hours ago: _rain_ , she remembers after a moment. _Summer storm_. The words are foreign, the ideas more so. Just like _night_.

“We wouldn't have met,” she finally says quietly. Marvels at the hurt it still causes.

“Oh, Kate,” Irene says, and for a second Kate thinks it's starting – but it's too soon, it can't... “You know you would have been there too.” And then she goes quiet.

Her fingers in Irene's hair, Kate thinks about a life in the dark. It's a formless thing, something unimaginable. But maybe there would have been other possibilities in such a life. Places to hide.

Irene appears to sleep, though that, too, has to be an illusion.

 

_07:49 pm_

Irene hasn't moved for minutes. Kate kisses the tips of her fingers and trails them over Irene's brow, and hates herself for it, that little gesture, far too little, far too late.

 

_08:00 pm_

The light rolls away gently. Just as quietly, Kate realises she is alone.

 

\------------------

 

_07:59 am_

And then, while the the beaches fill with those who waited, the pink marbled sky cracks and a sliver of sun breaches into the world.

Irene's mother bites down on her tongue, and feels the child inside her break like a wave.

Prophets chant.

 

_08:00 am_

_Theirs will be the life of light._

_Theirs will be the burning before the night._


End file.
